In this clarifying episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares why many founders enter Whitewater too early and how to stay in the Fun stage longer. If you’re implementing systems to avoid complexity or feel stuck between growth and process, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What style mix lets you maximize Fun before complexity forces the next stage
– Why trying to prevent Whitewater often pushes you into it prematurely
– How to recognize the only right reason to enter Whitewater—when operators hit their limit
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again to the Start, Scale, and Succeed podcast-the only podcast that grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a founder. I’m your host Scott Ritzheimer, and I wanted to take a moment here before things got really busy, as we’re looking to launch my new book, The Founder’s Game, which is coming out in February, to talk about a conversation I’ve been having a lot with my clients, and specifically, we’re going to do a little mini series here called “You’re Not in Whitewater Yet. Now, many of you will know what that means. You know that Whitewater is a stage in Les McEwen, a dear friend and mentor of mine, and in his model called the Predictable Success model, and it’s a tough stage.
It’s the thing that separates us from when we could grow in the fun stage to when we can scale in the predictable success stage, and it’s a really, really hard stage. And for that reason, a lot of people like me have gone into the business of coaching, consulting, and writing about the things that you need to do to get out of whitewater. However, that’s created a problem that a lot of people didn’t have before, and that problem is that trying to prevent whitewater by doing several things we’ll talk about throughout this series-very common things, things that you probably have done yourself-trying to prevent whitewater is actually one of the fastest ways to land yourself there prematurely. And to explain what I mean, I want to tell a quick story, a funny story about one of my sons, Liam. And this was when he was in elementary school, and they have this thing at their school called the Businesses of Tomorrow, and it’s this cool little job.
It’s not a job fair, but it’s like a business fair where all of the, I believe it’s fourth graders, get together, and they set up a stand and they they create a business and they pitch it to all of the parents and the other kids from the elementary school who come through. It’s this really cool entrepreneurial endeavor in elementary school, and it’s a big deal to them because whoever gets the most tickets, you you you award the best businesses with tickets, and whoever gets the best ticket ticket, whoever gets the most tickets gets bragging rights. They they get to be the one who’s got the business of tomorrow, and so they do all kinds of fun stuff. They’re pretty much all about video games and sports, and every once in a while, some food in there smattered in. But it’s a lot of fun. So the day comes. It’s businesses of tomorrow day. It’s pitch day, and Liam has worked for months on you know his presentation, his little booth. He’s got all of his talking points. He’s got it already, and he’s nervous as I’ll get out. And so, what that looks like for us is five a.m. The door to my bedroom comes flailing open.
I think it actually dented the wall, and so that’s the way to wake up, right? And Liam comes bursting through our room, runs straight through our room to the bathroom, and then into the big master closet, where you know all of our clothes are, and he’s like crashing around in there for five or 10 minutes. And again, I’m like half groggy because it’s five a.m. I’m not really awake yet. I don’t know what’s going on, and I just figure I’m going to ride it out. Yeah, let’s just see what happens. And again, about 510 minutes later, I don’t remember exactly what it was. He comes out of the bathroom. Every light is on now, and he’s again. He’s in fourth grade, and he’s he’s a little guy. He’s wearing one of my suits, and I’m not the tallest person in the world, but I’m taller than a fourth grader. We’ll put it that way. And he he looked really funny, and and in the cutest possible way, but he thought that putting on my suit made him a businessman. But the reality of it is that that wasn’t going to help him in his presentation because it didn’t fit. It wasn’t the right suit for him, and so instead we we walked over to his room.
Scott Ritzheimer
We we found his you know his uniform and his nice button up shirt and everything that fit. We got him all suited up and and sent him off. And he did a great job. He had a lot of fun with it. And I I will never forget that story because it illustrates something that I see my clients, especially my new clients, folks that I meet for the first time, many of them come to me because of Whitewater. It is a huge part of what we do. It’s a huge part of what we talk about, and so you know, along with Les and our other scale architects, we’re known for helping folks get out of this Whitewater stage. But the thing that’s changed, even in just the five years that I’ve done that, or the 10 years since I first learned about the model. I have found it’s actually far more likely to get into whitewater than it ever was before, but not for the right reasons, and that’s what I really want to explore in this series. Because there’s a good chance that many of you watching or listening to this will recognize and resonate with a lot of the things that we talk about when I describe the whitewater stage here in a minute or two, and you’ll think, “Gosh, I’m in whitewater, but you might not be, or at least you probably aren’t for the right reasons, and to understand why that is, one of the biggest factors is that the whitewater stage is a really hard stage. And again, we’ll talk about it in a moment.
But because it’s such a hard stage, there’s lots of people like me over the last 3040, 50 years who have entered into this coaching consulting space, which almost didn’t exist 50 years ago, and we’ve done it either intentionally or intuitively with this intent of kind of helping people with this whitewater stage. However, you can only help someone in whitewater if they’re actually in whitewater, and unfortunately, the craziest thing happens. But what happens is we start to teach people how to get out of whitewater by getting them into whitewater. That’s right. We we what’s happening now more than ever before is that folks are getting into whitewater for the wrong reasons. They’re not actually being pushed into whitewater. They’re pushing themselves into whitewater, and that’s just about crazy. But it’ll make sense why it’s happening. We’re going to unpack what’s happening, and we’re going to help you to avoid that. and And for those of you who are there right now, we’re going to help you to unwind it and really start to succeed.
So to do this, we’ve got to spend a little bit of time. We’re in this first episode here. I’m going to unpack the least you need to know about a couple of models and frameworks that are relevant here, so that you can understand the language that I’m going to use. And the first thing that we have to address is we have to address what these different stages are. Now, on this show, we talk a lot about levels, and those levels are the individual levels that you go through as a founder, and those run to some extent in parallel with, or a better way of saying it is alongside the stages that your organization goes through, or your team, or your group. Any group of two or more goes through these seven stages. And again, I know this is a little confusing. There’s levels and stages, so just bear with me. What we’re talking about here are the seven stages that organizations go through from launch to death and at the end, and the first of those stages is the early struggle stage. An early struggle is it’s just a fight for survival. We’re trying to find a profitable, sustainable market. It’s very rare that folks will confuse early struggle with whitewater. Some do. I’ve actually had that happen, but the reason for that is not because they’re both easy or hard, or is that early struggle makes sense for why it’s hard because it’s you’re creating something from nothing. And so those first few years of just trying to make this thing profitable were in early struggle. The second stage, very technical name. It’s called fun. Les named it fun. It’s just brilliant name.
Scott Ritzheimer
Unfortunately, most of us don’t recognize that it’s fun until we lose it. However, the fun stage is a stage where we sell, sell, sell. We just go and get it done. We we found our profitable, sustainable market in early struggle, and because of that, we’re just mining that market, and less accurately describes that the key here is to make sure that you’re mining that market, you’re driving revenue, you’re getting things done, and fun really if you let it can be a whole lot of fun, and then there’s this whitewater stage, and and what whitewater is is where the complexity in the organization causes us to cause problems. We create so much success in fun that it necessarily thrusts us to a new level of complexity in which our mo, our modus operandi from fun doesn’t work anymore, and that’s really important. That is the only reason why we should end up in whitewater is because the complexity that comes from our success, from the size and scope of what we’re doing, pushes us into whitewater. Now, there’s three other ways that we can do this unintentionally, and we don’t want to do that because when we do, we actually end up hitting whitewater way too soon, way prematurely, and we end up looking like Liam dressed in someone else’s clothes. It’s not pretty, so that’s the whitewater stage. And whitewater is what keeps us from really scaling.
We have to learn to build a decision-making machine by fully adopting systems and processes. And you might want to pay attention to that because it’s an important part later in the series. From there, we end up with the the fourth stage, which is a pretty cool stage. Again, it’s the predictable success stage where you can scale to whatever size your market will allow or that you want. And we do that by you know leveraging the systems and processes we learned in Whitewater, and also leveraging the innovate. And ingenuity and creativity and drive that helped us get out of early struggle and into fun. We put all those together, and that’s what allows us to not only achieve but sustain predictable success. However, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and what happens is that we start to push too much system in process because it got us out of whitewater and we end up in treadmill where we’re over processed for the first time. And then there’s a few other stages that aren’t really relevant to this journey. There’s the big rut and death rattle, and and we’re not really going to talk about those too much in this series.
So I’m just going to leave those for another time. If you want to know more about it, check out the Predictable Success book behind me. It’s fantastic, easy read. It’s a lot of fun. There’s an audiobook too for those of you who like to listen to stuff. What I want to dial in on then is this whitewater stage, and namely the stage that happens before, which is the fun stage. One of the common misconceptions when I first teach fun is that fun we we misinterpret fun as easy, and we think, well, if it’s not easy, it must be whitewater, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Fun is this, you know, breathless sprint across the finish line each and every day. The reason that it’s fun is because we’re doing that and we’re winning, right? It’s the reason why sports are fun for a lot of folks. Because if you look at what you’re doing in sports, especially in like something like tackle football, you’re getting obliterated most of the time, but it’s fun, especially if you win. That’s kind of what fun is like. It’s a full contact sport, and it’s not easy. And so, in this fun stage, one of the things that you’ll recognize, and those of you who are familiar with the predictable success model, will know that there are some people who are very well suited to the predictable success to this fun stage, and there are some folks who who aren’t, and that’s a really really big deal because there are four different leadership styles. There’s four ways that we show up for work.
Scott Ritzheimer
There’s four ways that an individual can help lead a team to success, and it’s important that we understand these styles as well because it’s the intersection between these two worlds that’s going to help us explain what we get, what we’re getting wrong, and how to correct it. So, of these four styles, quickly: visionary idea people, operators, get stuff done, people, processors, process people, and synergists-people, people. We have these four different styles. We have other episodes on this, and there’s a bunch of stuff on the website. We’ll link it in the show notes, but you can check out all of those different styles. You can even take the assessment for free if you’d like. However, one of the things that we have to recognize is that there’s an ideal style combination, not just for a person, but for a team and for an organization. And the the only two that I’m really going to talk about now are the predictable success stage, that one up at the top where we can scale. Well, the ideal combination there is visionaries, operators, processors, and synergists. We need all four styles for a bunch of reasons. We’re not going to go into here, but just suffice it to say, there’s a place for everyone, and the reason why I want to start there is because I want to make it really clear that none of the four styles is like worse than the other.
It’s not like there are good styles and bad styles, but there are stage appropriate and stage inappropriate styles, and that’s really important because that’s most of what we’re going to talk about here: is how stage inappropriate style biases and skews will push us out of the fun stage prematurely, and that stinks because I mean even if you don’t know what they are, but you’re just given the opportunity to grow in fun or fight against whitewater, which one do you want? It’s not a hard choice, and so it’s pretty obvious that what we want to do here is to not have to fuss with whitewater if we don’t have to. In fact, I can say this even more concretely, and that is that while you’re trying to grow, even if you’re trying to get to predictable success, no one should ever want to get to Whitewater. No one should ever implement a process to try and get to Whitewater. In fact, we want just the opposite. We want to keep Whitewater away for as long as we can, while we still grow in in order with our vision and what we’re trying to accomplish. And again, that’s really important because the goal again is not to implement something that gets us to whitewater so we can get to predictable success faster. Instead, the goal is to implement things that allow us to succeed in fun and run those plays into the ground.
I mean, run them again and again and again until we can’t run them anymore. And the reason we can’t run them anymore is whitewater. To to try and keep this from being too academic, I want to show you the real reason why you should end in whitewater and what that looks like inside of an organization. So the real reason that you should run into whitewater is. Because you have you’ve mastered the style combination that works best in fun, which is effectively a visionary or two surrounded by a whole bunch of operators, namely, processors and synergists are missing from the equation. Now you might have them inside your organization, but preferably they’re in a supporting role, or they’re just a blend with some of the other styles. But really, what we want to to have the ideal, right? Not actual, but ideal balance inside of the fun stage to to get as big as we can in fun, to have as much fun as we can, to stay in fun as long as possible. The ideal balance is a visionary quarterbacking a bunch of operators, and that’s really important because that is actually the description for when fun is over is when that play stops working. What that generally looks like is again we have a visionary. They’ve got a bunch of operators, and they’re just they’re just getting stuff done all over the place. Now it’s a little haphazard because there aren’t a whole bunch of systems and processes.
Scott Ritzheimer
Maybe some like SOPs at the front line, but like the minimum system and process that we need. It’s highly effective. It’s very effortful, and the best way I can describe it is is that it’s like we’re making diving catches on every play, and we’ve started to drop the ball. If you’re making diving catches on every play or almost every play, if you’re relying on heroes and it’s worked for a long time, right, or it’s worked to to grow your organization, and that’s not working anymore. What we’ve what we’ve reached is the point where we are over operated. Does that make sense? Where we’ve moved to the place where we have too much operator because we’ve we’ve grown so big, we’ve created so much complexity that just the operator style enough isn’t enough to do it anymore. We have too many operators to just keep trying to operate. And the best kind of indication is that your best operators, the folks that you rely on the most, the ones blood, sweat, and tears inside the organization, you know, godfather to your children, kind of a thing, when they start screwing up, when they start dropping the ball, that’s a great sign that you’ve you you could be in the actual whitewater stage. If you get to whitewater for any other reason than your operators have been given free rein to drive it as far as they can and they have hit their limit, you’re probably in whitewater for the wrong reasons, and we can boil down those wrong reasons into three different categories.
So the first one is that we are over visionaryed; we have too much vision or too many visionaries, and I’ll tell you what that looks like in the next episode. The next one we’re going to explore is where we are too processed. The real irony here is that you can get to whitewater too soon by adding system and process. And you might be thinking, “But Scott, didn’t you say we need systems and processes to get out of whitewater? Yes, exactly. But I’ll tell you why that doesn’t work in the the third episode of this series, and then the fourth episode of the series, we’re going to explore how being over synergized or being too people centric in the fun stage will prematurely put you in whitewater. In any of these cases, being over visionary, over processored, or over synergized, we can look like we’re doing the right things. We can talk like we’re doing the right things. We can actually follow what’s in the book of some really intelligent people, but end up making things a heck of a lot worse.
And the real problem with all three of those is not just that they land us in whitewater, but they make whitewater two times as hard to get out of, and takes two times as long to do it, and we don’t want to do that. And so, what I want to explore in this is what we can do to make sure we don’t end up in whitewater prematurely. How to get out if you have ended up in white water prematurely, and what the right way is to navigate all of this. We’ll do this throughout the rest of this series, and it’s going to be a whole lot of fun. So I’m glad you stayed with me. I know this is a little long. I know it’s a little academic. I just needed to give you some of the language. I needed to give you some of these styles. I needed to set the stage so we can really dial in on one of these problems. And what I’ll help you do over the next three is identify whether or not this is something you’re falling into, and if so, what you can do about it. I’ll see you there.
Scott Ritzheimer
Hey everyone, Scott Ritzheimer here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what you need for the level you’re. In right now, if you want to discover what level you’re in, take our 10-question Founders Evolution Quiz for free at foundersquiz.com. That’s foundersquiz.com. It’ll pinpoint exactly where you are and give you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next level in your journey as a founder. If you got something out of today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, or review. It helps us reach more founders like you, and let’s be honest, it means a ton to me, my team, and all our incredible guests. So keep starting, scaling, and succeeding, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
Contact Scott Ritzheimer
Scott Ritzheimer is the founder of Scale Architects and a leading expert on organizational life cycle and founder leadership. He has helped launch nearly twenty thousand businesses and nonprofits and, before turning thirty-five, built and sold his own multimillion-dollar company after a decade of double-digit growth. Today he helps founders and CEOs who have people to lead but are still buried in the daily grind, giving them a clear next step instead of a theory. He is host of the Start Scale Succeed podcast and author of The Founder’s Game.
Want to learn more about Scott Ritzheimer’s work at Scale Architects? Check out his website at https://www.scalearchitects.com/
Connect with Scott through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottritzheimer/
Pre-order a copy of Scott Ritzheimer’s book “The Founder’s Game” at https://www.scottritzheimer.com/book/pre-order